Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 40

How to Get The Current Day in Google Analytics

I’ve been using Google Analytics since around 2009 and one particular thing I’ve found annoying is the lack of a “get current day” feature.

Selecting a date for data to show

You can use the selector to find a range you want, including just a single day, but I’ve always wanted something faster.

Turns out there’s a simple solution…

If you set both range variables in the URL to the future, it’ll show you the current day by default.

The date range variables in the URL

I have a bookmark set to pull the dates of January 1, 3000 to January 1, 3000.

_u.date00=30000101&_u.date01=30000101/

…which always gives me the current day—and only the current day.

StepsGo to a page in Google Analytics like usual.Find a view that you’d like to save a “current day” bookmark for.Look in the URL for the _u.date bit at the end.Change that whole part to _u.date00=30000101&_u.date01=30000101/.Save the bookmark.

You now have a “current day” view in Google Analytics that works for any page in the application.

News & Analysis | NO. 316

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Start Here: How to Explore the Site

Welcome!

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

This site (and the Unsupervised Learning community behind it) focuses on the interesting and the wonderful from multiple disciplines—from cybersecurity to human meaning—from technology tutorials to personal productivity—and from appreciating the pleasures of life to learning how to be better.

In short, we enjoy learning how things work and using that knowledge to pursue appreciation and meaning.

I’ve been writing here since 1999 so many get lost on the site for hours or days at a time. Nothing wrong with that, but the paths below will help you head in the right direction.

A guided tourBrowse by categories.See what’s most popular.If you’re into information security.If you’re looking for tutorials.

News & Analysis | NO. 315

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SECURITY NEWSA mandatory-use mobile application for all athletes, journalists, and other Chinese Olympic attendees has serious security flaws, including a lack of certificate validation for encrypted communications. Citizen Lab told the organizing committee about the problems a long time ago but got no response. US athletes have been told to use burner phones. More

Twitter’s new CEO fired Mudge and Rinki Sethi as part of major changes to the Twitter security team. This in the same week that Twitter launched NFT profile pictures. More

McAfee and FireEye have combined to become ‘Trellix’. Is it just me or does McAfee have naming issues? Like what are the odds this will still be named the same in 5 years? More

The UK, backed by the US, said publicly that Russia plans to install a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine. And they named him. More

Vulnerabilities: F5 BIG-IP | 13 High | 7.5 More McAfee Enterprise Product | High | Code Execution More Drupal | System Takeover More Rust | 7.3 | File Deletion MoreCompanies: Banyan Security raised $30 million to do Zero Trust Network Access. More Cloud Security company Polar Security comes out of stealth with an $8.5 million raise. More
TECHNOLOGY NEWSSpotify has shut down its internal podcast studio. This comes as the momentum behind Spotify’s podcast play seems to be slowing. People are upset that Spotify podcasts aren’t fully on YouTube and other channels, and many people are pushing Spotify to take action on Rogan promoting vaccine misinformation. They’re still doing well, but seem to be facing some headwinds. More

Google is building an AR headset, called Project Iris, to go up against Meta and Apple. More

Streaming Music Marketshare Stats More Spotify: 31% Apple: 15% Amazon: 13% Tencent: 13% YouTube: 8%
HUMAN NEWSIn the US you can now order free at-home COVID-19 test kits, which are delivered through the post office. More


CONTENT, IDEAS & ANALYSIS

Consciousness is a Movie Screen Without an Audience, Theater, or Universe — My attempt to provide an accessible introduction to consciousness, meditation, and mindfulness. It uses a model of a Movie Screen to describe one’s consciousness, and explains how to use that model practically in daily life. More

Is This The Most Important Civilizational Pattern? — A quick explorative piece on what I think could be an underlying cause of our current struggles in 2022. More

Your Value Comes From Your Output — A direct and honest piece of advice on how to get a seat at any table you wish you were a part of. More

NOTESIt’s been years since we’ve done a survey on the audience here. If you can spare 11 seconds I’d appreciate some help quenching my curiosity. Plus it’ll help the show because potential sponsors like to know something about us. With me being me, however, I won’t be capturing name or any other personally identifiable information! It’s just two questions: industry and position. Really appreciate the help! Answer The Two Questions

I’ve finally finished Super Saiyan mode of my home audio setup, which I spent MONTHS researching starting when the pandemic happened. Won’t fully detail it here, but if anyone is curious, hit me up. I’ll give you three hints though: Genelec, NAD, and DIRAC Live. I’ve been having so much fun listening to both my favorites and tons of new music as well. I honestly think audio gear is some of the best money you can spend if you’re into music. Some of the other best money? Bidet toilet seats and a top-end mattress. 

A joke I thought of related to the Chinese Olympic “COVID” App: “This app’s killer feature is actually detecting exposure to Democracy.”
 
DISCOVERYWholesome Memes on Twitter — I recommend creating a Twitter list and putting a bunch of good news and kindness-based accounts in it. Use it for eye and soul bleach. More | Example
Is the Tech Bubble Crashing? More

Information Security Skillsets More

Red Team, Go! — A look at Jupiter One’s Red Team approach. More

The Cyber Plumber’s Handbook — SSH Tunneling, Port Redirection, and Traffic Bending, Oh My. More

The most brilliant explanation of GPS I’ve ever seen. More

Everything Must be Paid For Twice More

skybot.cam — Someone built a system that takes a picture of every plane that flies over their house, and it identifies the plane. More

Reverse Engineering 101 — An introductory course for reverse engineering, by Malware Unicorn. More

Awesome List of Secrets in Environment Variables — Lists of secrets, passwords, API keys, and tokens stored in system environment variables. More

ripgen — A Rust-based implementation of the dnsgen Python utility. 17x faster with 75% less memory. My guy Nate is seriously making me want to learn Rust. More | by d0nutptr (follow him)


RECOMMENDATIONThe next time you interview for a job, ask your potential new manager these five questions: When was the last time you promoted someone on your team? How did it happen? Why did the last person in this role leave? How do you nurture psychological safety in your team? When was the last time you supported a direct report’s growth, even if it meant leaving your team or company? Most/all of my interviewers were men. Can I speak to some women on the team to hear more about their experience?These come from this excellent Twitter thread by Lily Koning, and thanks to Jason Haddix for the retweet discovery.


APHORISM“I select a very small number of things to be skeptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hyper-skeptical. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremony of religion. We are made for it.”

— Nassim Taleb

Is This the Most Important Civilizational Pattern?

I’ve always been fascinated by this aphorism.

The original form pretends women don’t exist.

Hard Times Create Strong People. ↓
Strong People Create Good Times. ↓
Good Times Create Weak People. ↓
Weak People Create Bad Times. ↩

In this model, the only thing that can create strong people is suffering. And the only thing that can create good times is strong people. And when you have prosperity for too long, it removes the struggle for existence—which produces people with less character and strength.

…which then results in weaker people who then mess everything up.

Like I said, I’ve always thought that was smart and interesting, but over the last couple of years it’s started to scare the living shit out of me.

I see this all around me, and while I am cautious of peoples’ tendency to believe in models because of anecdotal experiences, I don’t think I can discard what I am seeing. Think about your own experiences and what the data say as well.

The vast majority of exceptional people I know are either recent immigrants to the country, grew up relatively poor, or are part of some sort of persecuted group.The people I see thriving in our current economy are mostly immigrants. In the Bay Area, tech is strongly represented by first and second-generation East Asians and Asian Indians, and a massive percentage of people working the hardest and most frontline jobs are Mexican immigrants.The longer a family generationally stays in the US the more average they become. Hard-working and financially successful parents have eternally struggled with the concern that the life they have created for their children will rob them of the character that they themselves have.

These all point in the same exact direction, i.e., the highest quality people come from a life of struggle. And the highest quality societies are built by the highest quality people.

It’s been 75 years since World War II. Do the math. That’s roughly two generations.

What if—and I’m just wildly speculating here—we can basically expect things to go to shit right about now?

Like, set your clocks, because it’s going to happen.

Forget the politics of it. Who to blame and who not to blame. It’s important in some ways, but not for this conversation.

What I think might be most important is declaring a species-level problem that the smartest people in the world need to work on. Namely, breaking the cycle of malaise that comes from good times.

We must learn, as a species, how to have our young people experience struggle and hardship—as if they were in hard times—even though they are in good times.

How do you do that?

This might be the best possible application of the metaverse and immersive VR I have ever heard of.

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

We make it part of school to deeply immerse into the hardship experienced by others, and give them the experience of living that hard, grinding life themselves. For years, as part of schooling, in a way where the spell isn’t broken when they take off the headset or unplug the Neuralink at the end of the day.

If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is.

I’m starting to think the only thing crazier is thinking we can avoid this happening repeatedly without acknowledging the problem and doing something drastic to fix it.

The stakes are unfortunately rising. It’s getting way easier to kill large numbers of people, so we can’t afford to keep advancing technologically while simultaneously providing generations of kids a lack of struggle and meaning during their formative years.

I think it produces a sense of emptiness in people, and makes them open to all manner of ideology—just to feel something.

We don’t want to crush people and rob them of their pride, because then they’ll look for a leader to tell them they’re the best and they should rule the world. And we don’t want to give them everything they want without having to work for it, because they’ll grow up empty and weak.

So we have to apply some sort of healthy struggle, even if we have the means to remove that struggle.

I honestly think this is one of the most important challenges to maintaining a healthy human civilization on this planet.

We should be working on this instead of trying to increase the clickrate on advertisments.

Consciousness is a Movie Screen Without an Audience, Theater, or Universe

I tried and failed to get into meditation for decades. I read all the books and watched lots of video, with no success. I was close to declaring it wasn’t going to happen for me.

My first success with it came from Sam Harris’ Waking Up book and mobile app. Sam explains consciousness and mindfulness better than anyone I’ve found, and now I’m happily a novice.

You’re probably saying to yourself:

Ok, fine, but why am I reading an article on consciousness from a novice?

Great question. The answer is that the thing I’m about to teach you is a way of thinking about consciousness and meditation that anyone can learn—even before you start practicing.

It all starts with five basic ideas that build off each other.

There is nothing in your life that you experience outside of the lens of consciousness; it’s is our only lens.When you realize everything you experience is part of consciousness, it follows that the sensation of you being a separate observer of consciousness is part of that—meaning the very idea of “you” separate from consciousness—is an illusion. This is why people talk of, “being one with consciousness”.There are two states you can be in when you’re conscious: distracted, and mindful. Most people spend their entire lives in the distracted state.When you’re distracted, you become the contents of your consciousness. So if you have angry thoughts and you feel disrespected and resentful, you become those things. If you’re mindful, you can sit within consciousness and merely witness its contents. In that mode, thoughts and feelings are appearing but you are not becoming them as they do so. The value of mindfulness is in the ability to spend more time in the mindful state rather than the distracted state, and to be able to switch there whenever you need to during everyday life.

These five points are the centerpieces of what I’ve learned from all the books, study, and sessions I’ve done so far— including all the meditation material I studied but didn’t understand before getting unlocked by Waking Up.

The Movie Screen

But don’t worry if you didn’t get all—or even much—of that. The five concepts are not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about The Movie Screen, which is the best metaphor I’ve found for explaining these five concepts in a tangible way.

Imagine a massive IMAX movie screen in a brand new theater. Just a giant flat screen. Seamless and boundless.

Now imagine it floating in empty outer space. There’s no theater. There’s no projector. And there’s not even an audience. You’re not even there. In fact, there’s no universe at all. There’s just The Movie Screen.

That movie screen is your consciousness. Be ready to call this screen to mind as we proceed.

Distraction vs. mindfulness

Ok, call up the screen—a single pane floating in space. All of reality plays on the screen. If you’re experiencing it, it is playing there and can play nowhere else.

Now, close your eyes and take inventory of what you’re experiencing. Notice the sounds, the variations in light behind your closed eyes. And notice the thoughts that come streaming in. Notice the feeling of clothes on your body. Notice the feeling of having limbs. Of feeling warm or cold. Just notice. Notice everything.

That place you just visited was The Movie Screen of your own consciousness. It is the only place where anything can happen in your life.

While you are awake, that screen never stops. The only question is whether you’re paying attention or not. If you are not paying attention, things will play on that screen and they will affect your behavior. Someone will be rude to you, or ignore you, or will discount an idea that you wanted to be heard.

Most people spend their lives acting out their inputs in perpetual distraction.

The emotion of anger will play on your screen, and because you didn’t notice it playing, it will become you. You will walk around angry for minutes, or hours, or maybe the entire day. You won’t usually notice, or know exactly why. You’ll just feel like that, and you’ll be a worse friend, a worse co-worker, a worse partner, or a worse parent—all because a thing played on the screen that you didn’t witness and observe.

What this practically means is that you become your inputs. You absorb anger, you become anger. You absorb sadness, you become sadness. This is what happens to people who cannot look at their screen. They are walking string puppets acting out what happened on their screens while they weren’t looking. And most of the world lives every moment of every day like this.

Yuval Harari meditates for 2 hours a day, and he says it’s the only reason he can finish writing books.

But there’s a simple alternative, which is to switch into the state of mindfulness. Not for a decade on a mountain like a monk, but just for a moment, or a few seconds, or maybe 10 minutes a day.

When understood and practiced this way, mindfulness works instantly. Simply close your eyes and observe.

How did that comment make you feel? Did you feel hurt? Angry? Aggressive? Sad? Stare directly into that emotion on your screen and you’ll see something remarkable happen.

It will dissipate almost instantly.

When you observe things playing on your screen—whether they are thoughts or emotions—that you don’t want to affect you, you remove their ability to do so. They become actors on a screen. Temporary occurrences that have a beginning and an end.

Keep in mind that the sensation of you being separate is also another actor on the screen.

While you are in that state, the world calms. Things are playing, and you are observing. In fact, you’re just one of the things playing yourself. That’s all there is. Notice it. Notice everything. Observe every itch, every pain, every prompt, every smell, every sound, and every breath.

The real currency isn’t money or time—it’s attention.

Time slows and everything fades. There is only that.

Now, if you’re not trained in this, you’ll inevitably fail at this after a few seconds and you’ll make the mistake of becoming distracted. You’ll let a thought hit you instead of observing it directly.

You will become that thought.

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

Once you do you’ll become the puppet again. Flying through life feeling whatever, thinking whatever, doing whatever. You might be driving, or working, or talking with someone. But you won’t be yourself; you’ll be the manifestation of whatever’s playing on your screen without you paying attention. You cannot control the next thought that pops into your mind. But you can decide to go into a mindful state so you’re ready for the next one.

That’s all mindfulness is. It’s deciding to be an observer in control instead of a puppet.

Your new superpower

I use Waking Up’s 10-minute daily meditation for this.

I practice mindfulness for 10 minutes every morning. I’d like to do 2 hours like Yuval Harari, and maybe I will someday, but the power from meditation isn’t just in the long sessions you do to start or end a day.

As Sam Harris constantly reminds us, and as we talked about above, the true power of mindfulness is in the ability to call on it whenever we want.

Are you in a frazzled state? Did you just receive some troubling news? Are you feeling overwhelmed?

Pull up your screen and observe what’s playing on it.

If you’re a Star Trek fan it’ll be a lot like coming out of warp and landing in the middle of a massive ship battle. Chaos all around you. Wow! This is what was happening? No wonder I felt bad!

When you spend your life distracted, it’s as if that time didn’t happen at all.

Watch the screen. Observe. Every feeling. Every itch. Every thought. Your emotional backdrop. The state of your body. Feel your tongue in your mouth. Hear every sound. Notice everything that’s playing. Watch every actor closely. Pay them the respect of attention.

You’re back in control. You’re back in a state of peace. Not because those things aren’t happening, but because you aren’t becoming them.

You can do this at any moment of any day. It’s mindfulness, and it’s a superpower.

Collapsing the illusion of self

We can use this same power to evaporate the illusion that we are separate from our consciousness.

Any time you feel a sensation of “you-ness”, a sense of identity, like a sense of seeing out of your eyes, of having a head—or being over “here” while those things are over “there”—notice that those are all things playing on the screen as well.

Paying attention magnifies the value and duration of your experience—like living additional lifetimes.

Notice this new actor on the screen wearing a shirt that says, “It feels like I have a head”. If you’re distracted, it just feels like you have one. But if you’re paying attention it’s a guy on-screen wearing a silly t-shirt with text on it.

This is a special screen, remember. It doesn’t just play images. It plays all sensations. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and even emotions. One of the things it can play is the sensation of perspective. Like being inside your body, or being here relative to a thing that’s far away. Or feeling a poke on your foot as being further away than a poke on your cheek. Those are all perspective sensations playing on the screen.

One of those sensations is the feeling that you’re separate from the screen.

SummaryEverything you experience happens in consciousness.This includes the sensation that you are separate from consciousness.A good model for consciousness is a giant, flat movie screen suspended in space. Everything that you experience—from sensations to thoughts to emotions—are things playing on that screen.There are two states of consciousness: 1) being distracted, i.e., ignoring what’s playing on your screen, and 2) being mindful, which is paying attention to everything playing on your screen.If you’re distracted, you become what happens to you and how those things make you feel. If you are mindful, you can simply observe what happens and avoid becoming your inputs.

News & Analysis | No. 314

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Your Value Comes From Your Output

work output miessler

I’m not sure who needs to hear this, so I’ll just put it here in hope it reaches someone who does.

Your value to most people in the greater uninterested world comes from your output.

Not your ideas. Not your talent. Not your potential. Your output. The fruits of your labor, not the labor itself.

Effort might be visible to those around you, but it’s not visible to the world. It’s is like a scream in space: you screamed, but nobody heard you.

I think about this a lot when I’m in self-reflection mode—a.k.a, beat-myself-up mode.

Where are my accomplishments? How often have I been on the Sam Harris podcast? How many entries does my work have on Wikipedia? How many patents do I have? How many books have I written? How many people read those books?

In short, what mark am I making in this world?

Those are the questions I ask myself, but that’s not quite the point of this. My bigger point is that you should never think that you deserve to be in any of those things if you haven’t done the work and produced tangible output from it.

Tangible output.

Sam (Harris) has people on his podcast all the time, and I consider it an ultimate honor to be asked onto that show. There are lots of bigger shows, with bigger audiences, but Sam picks his guests based on the impact they’re having on the world. He brings people on that he thinks are contributing to the world in a meaningful way.

When I’m measuring myself, and my work, and my actions, and my habits—I regularly think about what it would take to be invited onto that show. Or to have 10 entries in Wikipedia. Or to get more patents. Or to be asked onto Bill Maher.

Many B-level players in any field have this strange fascination with being part of the A-team. To be invited to their parties. To be on their shows. To be part of their elite group. Whether that’s in sports, or media, or business. And they use their considerable intellects to think about various ways they can convince the A-team to let them in.

Being smarter, funnier, better looking, etc.

Maybe if I did X instead of Y—then I would have been invited to be part of that group…

But it’s mostly bullshit.

What people either don’t know—or don’t want to accept—is that the way to get invited is by putting in the work on a valuable problem and having some success. You have to grind—often in complete silence and anonymity—for some period of time. Maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe decades.

And even then you might still never be noticed. You might still die in the squalor of invisibility. But at least you have a chance.

The short answer here is grinding. Finding an interesting problem, getting the proper training (or training yourself if your discipline will allow you to achieve recognition that way), and then working like Edison for as long as it takes.

That’s it. That’s the secret. Hard fucking work. Quiet work. Which results in actual benefit to the planet.

It’s not sufficient, but it is necessary.

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

So why am I writing this down? Because someone might need to hear it. When I figured it out it was a big revelation to me, and I want to pass it along to anyone who might benefit.

Don’t wish you were in the club. Don’t find ways to sneak in. Do the work required to be respected by the people who are already in. Do that work quietly. For its own sake. And forget about the club.

That’s the best possible way to get in.

Don’t tell painters you love their painting so you can be invited to paint with them. Just paint.Don’t tell hackers you love hacking. Just hack.Don’t tell thinkers you love thinking. Just think. And write down those thoughts.Don’t tell successful businesspeople that you love money and creativity. Start a business and make some money.

To be respected as a dancer by dancers, you have to dance.

Action

So what can you do about this if you’re not currently dancing?

If you’re someone who cares about being respected in some particular circle, I think there are two primary things you need to ask yourself:

Are you working on a question or a problem that is worthy of the field?Are you making consistent and valuable contributions towards answering that question?

If you’re not working on a worthy question or problem, you should find one. And if you’re not doing good work towards a good question, you need to change that.

Within the context of this endeavor.

Avoid the allure of confusing effort or being busy with output. If you’re not making tangible contributions to this problem you’ve chosen, it’s nearly the same as doing nothing.

You must both be focused on the right thing, and be contributing meaningfully.

SummaryYour value to the people you respect is in the output you can produce within your field.If you want to be part of an elite group, as a peer, don’t waste your time trying to convince them of your worthiness.Instead, find a quality problem in that space and make a plan to produce meaningful results towards solving that problem.More than anything, the world judges people by their tangible output.NotesThere are sometimes exceptions where a trick or persistence combined with luck can get someone into an elite group, but the moment is usually fleeting if you don’t have what it takes to remain.There is a whole other dimension of reality in which I don’t agree at all with this post. Perhaps I’ll do a rebuttal post at some point and give that other perspective. Spoiler: friendship and kindness and love aren’t “outputs”, but they’re still worthy endeavors.Yes, I’ve read Ayn Rand, but not recently. And I don’t find her ideas about this type of thing all that compelling. But yes, I do see the similarities.Image by drawlab19.

Gaming is Metaverse 1.0

People are hyped about the metaverse, and it’s honestly understandable. First, we’re going through some shit as a species right now. Social tension, the best part of Star Wars’ last three movies were the previews, and there’s a global pandemic. Part of this metaverse hype is just being excited to be excited, and I get it.

Metaverse lore has lots of fun stuff in it—from AR/VR to headsets to avatars to moving between worlds. But I think we can reduce the metaverse to one concept and two axes.

The metaverse is about experiencing a better life than in meatspace.Most important to this is content.Second most important to this is interface.Content

Content is life. It’s the source of meaning. It’s what gives provides us with evolution’s nectar of happiness in the form of hormone releases when we struggle and achieve something.

Throughout history we’ve had this naturally. Survival was hard. Mating was hard. Everything was hard. So you were rewarded by evolution with a squirt of happiness if you just survived.

But then you had to reproduce as well, and if you were able to find someone and make some babies, more squirts for you. You’re not dead, and you’ve passed on some genes. Evolution is happy with you, and you die a relatively happy person.

Then modernity comes and fucks everything up by making everything easy. There’s no faster way to create depression than to remove struggle and attainment.

With automation and AI, more and more humans are becoming what Yuval Harari calls the Useless Class. It’s not meant to be harsh. It just means there will soon be billions of poeple who can’t do anything better than a machine can do, and that’s a problem in our current society.

So. That brings us back to Content.

Gaming provides an escape from reality. For some it’s just a temporary distraction, like masturbation, or going for a walk, or watching a dumb TV show. But for people who are deeply unhappy, it’s more than a distraction: it’s an alternate existence that protects their defeated psyche from reality.

People need Life Loops that provide meaning. Their own version of rolling the boulder up the hill. And there’s a lot of research that shows that addiction isn’t a drug problem as much as it’s a lack of connection problem. A lack of meaningful Life Loops.

In short, if meatspace content sucks, people will look for alternative content. And that’s what gaming is to millions upon millions of people.

The content matters, though. People probably don’t lose as many marriages to Tetris as World of Warcraft, and that’s because of the attraction factor of the Life Loops that are offered.

Tetris has a loop of sorts. But it’s very short, and very shallow. It’s not overly life-like. It’s more like meditation or knitting.

World of Warcraft—and other games like it—have many aspects of real-life that people enjoy, and thus it’s easy for the brain (and evolution) to get confused about which life its supposed to reward with a squirt of happiness.

What’s more meaningful: your kid getting an A- in science, or you getting a new piece of epic gear and a promotion within your guild?

As I’ve said before, having alternate life loops can be problematic.

If you have no worthy struggles in your life, or no capability to rising up and achieving in the face of those struggles, you might opt for a place where you can grind and achieve.

So WoW is clearly better than Tetris in this regard, but it’s still nowhere near the pinnacle of the Content axis. Let’s think about what pinnacle content might look like.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to see what it’ll look like. All we have to do is look at the best and most popular books, manga, and movies.

Find the protagonist in those stories, whether it’s epic fantasy or romantic erotic novels, and then imagine an AI-generated game in which you’re the main character.

You get bullied some. You have some bad times. But you develop a special gift. Most people don’t know you have it, but it comes out some times, and you hide it from everyone. Except maybe your best friend.

And there’s a love interest. Or a dark potential lover that’s unattainable and dangerous, but who’s somehow taken an interest in you. Or a threat arises that only you can face, using these new powers, that very few people know you have.

But here’s the thing: it’s not the same experience, playing this game, for you and for someone else. No. All the characters are different. They look different. Different voices. Different quirks. Both good guys and bad guys and extras. Even the plot changes from player to player and instance vs. instance. That’s the power of AI.

Watch Total Recall if you haven’t.

So, what we’ll have is deep and meaningful games, largely generated by AI, with tons of customization and tweaking options, that could take weeks or months—or even years—to develop and climax.

So in meatspace you work at the Amazon factory training Bingo the robot how to do your box-stacking job, but you don’t care because in reality you’re Tristian the Bastard Sword Weilding Slayer of Dragons. And you have a deep mission to defend a town that you’ve spent years protecting and growing and nurturing. Plus a woman you’re in love with, who is technically an AI but you don’t even care anymore.

That’s Content. This is not fiction, this is inevitability. This is where all gaming is going.

This is true not only because it’ll develop naturally as an evolution of gaming, but because governments will realize the only way to pacify billions of people is by providing them a Life Loop that doesn’t involve revolution. So the militaries around the world will pay the gaming companies to make better and better stuff.

Interface

Now let’s talk about the interface into these worlds. With Pong, or Tetris, or whatever Gen-1 game, it was barely even life-like. But it was enough to pretend with an active imagination.

You’re touching some sort of physical interface, just with your hands, and pressing some sort of buttons. Good. Fair enough. It gets it done.

As we move ahead a few decades, we can now sit in a wonderful chair, look at life-like and beautiful graphics on giant displays, and hear everything in sound from every angle.

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

That’s a huge jump, but you’re still looking at a flat screen, and you’re still mashing buttons. One of the biggest transitions of interface will be moving from mashing buttons that are shortcuts to physical action to performing some emulation of that physical action. For example: swinging down with your arm to forge a sword in the game.

We saw this in Ready Player One, and we see some of it already in current AR/VR games like Beat Saber. The better the interfaces get, the more realistic all those interactions will be, with you actually doing them—either with your body or your brain.

The next level of this will be what we already know is coming from multiple companies. Meta. Apple. MagicLeap. All these companies are supposedly working on headsets that will make these gaming experiences more realistic. And that means from a visual and sound perspective, but also from an action perspective.

Again, think Beat Saber. That’s the way you’ll be doing sword fights before too long.

The endgame there is what Elon is working on with Neuralink. Who knows if he’ll land it or not, but we do know it’ll eventually land. And that’s the ultimate interface because then there’s no difference at all between thinking about doing it and doing it.

Thought becomes the action. And that action gets translated in both directions back to the brain and back to the game. That means you get to feel pain, and anger, and lust, and sex, and fighting, and jumping out of a plane, and all the different things you can do in meatspace. But better.

Maybe there will be a whole set of intermediary steps between headsets and brain interfaces, like the sensory suits we see in lots of films, but I think we might just skip those. There’s a chance we’ll just move from better and better headsets, skip the suits, and go right to brain interfaces.

But who knows.

Content + Interface

However we get there, and however fast, our inevitable motion as a species is upwards and to the right on this graphic.

The content will be highly randomized, highly customized just for the player, and so meaningfully deep and rewarding that it’ll be better than anything you can imagine in life. It’s hard to compete with being Superman and saving the world and winning the girl, over the course of multiple years of deeply meaningful game time.

It’ll be even more engaging when it’s beamed right into your brain.

It’s especially hard to do that when it was all experienced through a headset you can wear for 12-hours straight, and that projects a visual and sound field that feels nearly realistic, and which allows you to move and jump and kick and thrust (swords, settle down) like real life. When you get done with a 10-hour session and you’re sore and sweaty, that’s going to be a boon for human health. Physical at least.

Escape

Despite what Pinker says, life is getting harder for humans, not easier. Or said another way, it’s getting easier which is making it unbearable.

As normal people continue to be crushed by the banality of meatspace, stripped of opportunities for worthwhile struggle and attainment, more and more of them will abandon it for something better.

There are now over 3 billion active gamers in the world.

Gaming is not fundamentally different than the metaverse; it’s just less-evolved in content and interface. It’s just an earlier version.

Gaming is Metaverse 1.0.

News & Analysis | No. 313

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SECURITY NEWSWeb3 and NFT Analysis — Moxie Marlinspike wrote a brilliant piece last week on Web3 and NFTs. Web3 is such a major topic I thought it was worth covering in-depth and in the security section. The biggest point of his piece, at least to me, was that there’s generally no mechanism for ensuring the integrity of NFTs. He created his own example NFT which was just a link to a web server, and then he proceeded to modify and delete what existed there. The result was that he could have an NFT in a wallet one moment, delete it off his server, and the NFT would disappear from the wallet! The second major point, which is larger in scope, is that Web3 is all based on servers, not on clients, and people don’t want to run their own servers. This means there will be tremendous pressure for big companies to run most of the servers—aka most of Web3. The overall takeaway for me was very “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” in the sense that most people believe blockchain and Web3 have this powerful integrity built-in. Right now. Today. Moxie demonstrated very clearly, both with prose and with examples, that this is not the case. This doesn’t mean Web3 is lost by any means, but it does give one pause when hundreds of billions of dollars are being thrown around in NFTs and Web3 based on assumptions that aren’t currently true. More | One Response to Moxie

A North Korean cyberespionage group called Konni has been linked to attacks on the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These attacks started with credential stuffing and then loading malware to steal intelligence. More

Venture funding in the cybersecurity space crossed $20 billion in 2021, and the last quarter set a new quarterly record of $7.8 billion. More

Part of the Pegasus spyware package has been uploaded by a security researcher to Github. More

QNAP has warned its users to get its NAS devices off the internet, and it’s given instructions on how to do so. This comes after months of repeated vulnerabilities affecting the devices. More

SSH 8.9 will include agent restriction, which will have two main functions: “a safe runtime store for unwrapped private keys, removing the need to enter a passphrase for each use, and a way to forward access to private keys to remote hosts, without exposing the private keys themselves.” More

The US military is working hard to counter the threat posed by hobbyist-level drones. The problem is that they’re both small and cheap, and you can strap explosives to them. Possible solutions range from lasers to microwave blasts. More

Vulnerabilities: VMware has patched a bug affecting ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion | System Takeover More WordPress has been updated to address multiple vulnerabilities | DoS MoreIncidents:  The New York State Office of the Attorney General has warned 17 companies that 1.1 million customers have had their accounts compromised using credential stuffing. MoreCompanies: Google has purchased Siemplify—a late-stage Israeli company in the SOAR space—for around $500 million. More
TECHNOLOGY NEWSApple has become the first company to hit $3 trillion dollars in market cap. It was also the first to hit $2 trillion, and if it has any success with a rumored headset and car, it’ll probably be the first to $4 trillion. I attribute a lot of this to Tim Cook and his expertise in managing a supply chain. More

GameStop is getting into NFTs. More

Blackberry devices stopped working on January 4th. For real this time. More

OpenSea, the largest NFT trading website, is now valued at $13 billion dollars. More

Twitter is rolling out a new test feature where people do video reactions to tweets, like TikTok. More

It’s been 15 years since Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone. I remember where I was that day, and what I was doing. It was a big day for me, and it lead to me becoming an Apple person when I was not at all before. More


HUMAN NEWSA record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November. The number of open positions fell from 11.1 million to 10.6 million in October. More

Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting having no sexual activity (including masturbation) rose from 29% to 44% among men, and from 50% to 74% for women. More

The Mayo Clinic fired 700 unvaccinated employees due to noncompliance with vaccination policy, which is around 1% of its workforce. More

A nasal spray that prevents dementia is moving into human trials. It combines an antibiotic and resveratrol to combat plaques in the brain that are known to be associated with cognitive decline. More

1 out of every 153 American workers works for Amazon. More


CONTENT, IDEAS & ANALYSIS

The Unsupervised Learning Everyday Carry — Many have asked what my EDC is, i.e., what tools and gadgets I keep on my person and use every day. This member-only post answers that question and goes into why I use each item. More

Mentor vs. Nemesis — I enjoyed this piece on how many great people weren’t encouraged by mentors as much as they were energized by a nemesis. I see this dynamic a lot in life, where there is a health tension and competition between friends and peers in a particular space. The bug bounty space is a great example, where you have a lot of very smart hackers and creators putting out content. They’re friends, but they’re also competing. And some of them have one or more nemesis’ that drive them to be better. I’m not sure the right balance of positive and negative—of push and pull—but I do think that it’s natural to be driven by negative competition. I personally use a different tactic, which is competing with the best in the world, including people who are dead, and demanding that I get to that level.

The Usefulness of “Prepping” — A Tucker Max blog post about prepping blew up recently. It’s all about what you need to truly get ready for a massive crash, and what actually won’t work even though people think it will. I thought it was a good piece and it echoed my thoughts on the topic. The most important of which was that if you don’t have a community defense strategy, you don’t have a survival strategy. Meaning, you can have all the food stores you want, but if you can’t defend them from a group of men with guns, you don’t have much. My current methodology isn’t much modified by the piece, i.e., having enough to escape and survive for a few weeks while things go back to normal after a natural disaster or something similar. I still contend that if the US or the world economy fails, there’s nothing my bugout bag is going to do to help me. For that, you basically need a place in Idaho to meet your friends and start a new civilization. Note: a lot of the prediction and political stuff in the piece, I just don’t agree with. But I did find the preparation stuff thought-provoking. More

I vs. T-shaped People: Which Are Better For Which Jobs? — This was an interesting piece and discussion on Hacker News about someone who typically looks for I-shaped people (narrow and deep) vs. T-shaped people (broad and shallow), but who also happened to notice that most of their best projects had a good mix of both. I tend to look for people who are unicorns in this way: being mostly T, but with one or two I-like areas.


NOTESNot sure who’ll notice, but I simplified the newsletter design for this episode, especially around the header. If you noticed and cared, let me know what you think.

We had a great UL Book Club today discussing Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. The next book has been chosen and we even have the next couple picked out after that. Great discussion today, and can’t wait for the next one! 

I continue to struggle with blatant plagiarism of my content online and am looking for a solution to it. If you all know of anything, please let me know. More SPONSORED DISCOVERY

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DISCOVERYI just bought a couple of these masks, which came highly recommended by Clive Thompson. We’ll see how they do I’ll report back. More

My Personal Notetaking Journey More
The Rise of Performative Work — “It’s not what you do. It’s how ostentatiously you do it.” More

Ethereum’s Reference on Smart Contract Security More

AI is Eating The World’s Workforce With Job Automation More

6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet More

GovInfo RSS Feeds — A massive list of RSS feeds that let you track what the government is doing, from bills to budgets to congressional committee meetings, and more. More

The Wall — Near-real-time animations of geostationary satellites. More

Keyboard Drill — An elegant website that helps you learn to type faster. You give it a target WPM, and it drills you until you get that fast on various words. More

ffuf — My favorite web fuzzer, which is written in Go. More

nuclei — The future of vulnerability scanning (in my opinion). It’s YAML-based signatures for finding issues across multiple protocols. More

nuclei templates — A repository of check types that can be used with Nuclei. More

A TomNomNom Recon Tools Primer — A previous post of mine going over my favorite recon tools from @TomNomNom. More


RECOMMENDATIONSpend this time in January to lock in a solid daily routine. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits. We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems. That means you need a good system. This is mine, which I spent like a week researching and writing during the holiday break. But it doesn’t matter so much which one you use. It matters more that you actually have one, and that you use it rather than relying on luck or hope. Find an algorithm that will get you to where you want to be, and follow it.


APHORISM“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

— Nasim Taleb